Bloomberg.com: Japan
Japan wants to attract more foreign investors to its debt market as they account for just 3 percent of government bond sales, according to the Finance Ministry.
Japan’s public debt, the heaviest in the industrialized world, is expected to total 719 trillion yen ($7 trillion), or equal to 144 percent of gross domestic product, by March 2005

- 2004 rice harvest below average
TOKYO —Japan’s rice harvest index for 2004 came to a “slightly poor” reading of 98, remaining below the base of 100 for an average year for the second year in a row, due to a series of typhoons this fall…..

Man, 2 children die in murder-suicide over boy’s atopy
OSAKA —A 30-year-old office worker, his 4-year-old son and just-born baby girl died and the children’s 29-year-old mother was left unconscious Wednesday in an apparent suicide pact over atopic dermatitis suffered by the boy…

Dr Tue – 11.30.2004 Take a walk (and a beer) down Memory Lane
When I am taking visitors out and they start on the whole tired of “Tokyo is like Blade Runner, without the flying cars” thing, I usually just nod and take them to Shinjuku Nishiguchi…..
….It’s impossible not to experience at least some level of self-sufficient ‘I-bet-they-don’t-mention-this-in-lonely-planet’ pride when you walk through that uber-authentic remnant of post-war Tokyo, trying to catch your breath amidst the carcinogenic fumes of kushiyaki barbecues and slaloming between drunk salarymen and people sitting at the street-side stalls in an alley that is barely big enough to walk with your arms outstretched…..